“There are places women can go. Gulden women. Where they can get food, and have shelter for a few nights, and find help getting settled into their new lives in the city. I work at a place like that. Mostly, I do fund-raising—I go into the city and ask wealthy merchants to help fund the charity bank.”

“Gulden or indigo?”

“Both, but I generally have more luck with the indigo.”

“That’s odd.”

“Not if you’ve been paying attention. The gulden don’t approve of the Lost City.”

“Well, blueskins aren’t known for their kindness to the gulden.”

“Ah, but blueskin women have a certain sense of—sisterhood, almost—with guldwomen. They like to think their meager contributions will lead to an overthrow of the patriarchy. And maybe they will. So some of them have been generous. But they don’t like to deal directly with the gulden women—especially the poor ones in the Lost City—so I’m usually the emissary who approaches them. It makes them more comfortable, because they think I’m one of them. They don’t realize how wrong they are.”

He gave her a long, serious look. She became immobile under his scrutiny, neither looking away nor scowling to turn his gaze aside. He did not seem to be staring at her features so much as peering behind the worthless mask of skin and skull to pore over the brain below. Then he gave his head a small, helpless shake and shrugged.

“I don’t understand you,” he said again. And she made no answer. It was not something she knew how to explain.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

True dark again. Nothing to see out the train’s smudged window. Nolan stared out anyway, since it was all he felt safe doing. He was sick of this strange food, sick of the endless lazy rocking of the train, sick of his own thoughts of outrage and betrayal.

And electrified by this woman who traveled beside him, instructing him and mocking him by turns, revealing herself more with every word, confusing him more with every syllable. She looked every inch the indigo heiress, with that flawless blue skin, those aristocratic features, that turn of expression that could make a man feel like contaminated mud beneath the most expensively shod feet.

And yet she had rejected that pampered lifestyle wholesale. She had chosen to live among foreigners, adopting many of their beliefs—but challenging that lifestyle as much as she challenged the one that was hers by birthright. There did not seem to be a place for her either in the ordered scheme of the gulden world or the rigid caste system of the indigo. She was like no one he had ever encountered before. He could not get his mind to track with hers; he could not comprehend her motives or her values.